Posts Tagged #futurereadylearning

Keeping a journal is a common approach to both building self-awareness and learning from specific events or activities. Journalling can be a regular habit (e.g. daily or weekly), or done when specific triggers occur. Either way, keeping a journal is one of the most useful personal development and learning habits you can develop.

Benefits of keeping a journal

Writing in a journal can be what Charles’ Duhigg refers to as a ‘keystone habit’ in his book The Power of Habit:

“small changes or habits that people introduce into their routines that unintentionally carry over into other aspects of their lives.”

A keystone habit helps lock other habits into place. As such I recommend regular reflection via a journal as a high leverage learning habit, and an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to be more effective with their personal learning.

The following articles discuss a range of benefits of keeping a journal:

More specifically, if your intent is to learn, keeping a journal is a form of sense-making; it helps you to make sense of and experience or even, see patterns and connections over time, and improve how you learn.

When to Write

You can either write on a regular schedule (e.g. daily or weekly), or when a specific event occurs (e.g a project milestone, after a recurring meeting). Research on habit formation indicates that you are more likely to develop a habit if you identify a cue or trigger for doing the action you want to take. For example, when you sit at your desk after your afternoon coffee, after your morning walk, after your weekly team meeting.

For many people scheduling an appointment in their calendar / diary helps to protect a block of time to write.

The time required to write in journal regularly does not need to be large. You could invest as little as ten minutes a day to gain significant benefits over time.

What does a learning journal look like?

There is no set format for a journal. A blank page can be daunting, so having a standard structure will make keeping a journal easier. The following articles have some suggestions regarding structure and prompts:

One simple structure developed by John Driscoll is to use three questions:

What? Describing an event

So What? Analysing the event

Now What? Identifying what you will do (or do differently moving forward)

Experiment with formats. Combine different formats to figure out what you enjoy and find effective.

Journal entries can be made either by hand-writing or typing. Each has their pros and cons – try both and see what you prefer.

My Personal Journal Practice

My Year 8 English teacher introduced me to journaling, and I’ve maintained this practice on and off for close to four decades. When I commenced journaling hand-writing was the only option. I enjoyed the tactile sensation of writing on paper, the look of my journals lined up on a bookshelf, and the ease of flicking through the pages. However, I was always concerned with privacy as it is easy for someone else to look through a physical notebook, and this led to some self-censoring. I’ve recently gone fully digital, including scanning a one-metre high stack of old paper journals (as shown in the photo).

I use Evernote for my journal as it synchronises across all my devices and has very good search capability. I’m interested to explore how my thinking on different topics has developed over time by searching for entries by word, phrase or tag.

I primarily use two formats – freeform writing for deep reflection and prompted entries on a daily and weekly basis using the following lists of questions:

This post is part of a series by Michelle Ockers outlining different ways of taking charge of your own learning. It was developed following delivery of a keynote on the topic ‘Future Ready Learning’ to provide resources for participants to explore approaches covered briefly in the keynote. Michelle can be contacted regarding keynote speaking on this theme at Michelle@michelleockers.com

This post is part of a series by Michelle Ockers outlining different ways of taking charge of your own learning. It was developed following delivery of a keynote on the topic ‘Future Ready Learning’ to provide resources for participants to explore approaches covered briefly in the keynote. Michelle can be contacted regarding keynote speaking on this theme at Michelle@michelleockers.com

There are many ways to take charge of your own learning.One way of identifying your options is to look at three broad approaches:

Learning from yourself

Leraning from resources

Learning from others

For ideas about how you can learn, tools and links to further resources choose from the list below.Select a hyperlinked item for further information.You can use this post as a master list to access posts on each item.

Note– I am writing these posts as a follow-on action from a keynote presentation on Future Ready Learning at a professional development conference in February 2018.I will gradually add linked posts on all items in coming weeks.Consider this a ‘work in progress’ which I am sharing as it is developed so that people can start using it immediately and provide me with feedback and suggested improvements.If you have any comments or suggestions please message me via Twitter, LinkedIn or email (Michelle@michelleockers.com).

The image below shows some of the ways of learning that I will add to this master list.

Learning From Yourself

Learning from yourself consists of both doing and reflecting.They are complimentary, iterative actions.

Doing

To be added

Reflecting

Reflection is a powerful way to learn from our own experience. It is a process of thinking about a past event and thinking about what happened and what you can learn from it. We can reflect either with others or on our own. We also have the option of keeping individual reflection private or sharing it with others.

While you can reflect in your head, it can be very helpful to make a record both to improve the quality of your thinking and to have a record that can reviewed at a later time to gain further insight as you look for patterns and further learning.

Learning From Resources

Resources for learning come in a wide range of forms. This list predominantly covers online resources. It will also cover books (which can be consumed electronically or in hard copy).

Online Resources

One of the great things about the internet is that it’s given us access to an incredible amount of resources and content. This is also one of the really challenging things about the internet. To get the most out of online resources requires that you can find good quality content relevant to your needs. Fortunately there are tools available to help with this and skills that you can develop to critically evaluate sources. You will also find your online network will assist you with this both directly and indirectly through their use of common tools that enable resources to be readily shared between people with common interests.

This is a summary of key themes of the keynote presentation I delivered at the 2018 Administrative Professionals Conference at University of Wollongong. The overall theme of the conference was ‘Be Future Ready.’ This summary will be used in an internal publication reporting on the conference.

Ongoing change is normal in today’s workplace, with much of it being driven by advances in technology. We have entered the 4th Industrial Revolution where computers and robotics are replacing or supplementing work done by human brains. Digital technology has already changed the way many products and services are purchased and delivered, and has radically altered industries including banking, travel, music and movies.

All occupations will be impacted by automation and people will increasingly interact with digital assistants and other forms of Artificial Intelligence to get their work done. Besides being able to work effectively with technology, social skills which are difficult for computers and robots to replicate are becoming increasingly important – such as empathy, compassion, listening, influencing and leading people.

The employment relationship is also changing with more people being engaged on temporary contracts and short-term projects or tasks rather than being permanently employed. Many of the conference participants indicated that they have already worked in this way as part of the ‘gig economy.’

To keep our skills relevant and be future ready in an environment of ongoing change and increasing competition for work roles it is imperative that we take charge of our own learning. This requires us to shift our mindset to learning continuously as we work rather than expecting training courses to be adequate to maintain our skills. Michelle explored ways of doing this by learning from yourself, from resources and others.

Michelle invited participants to recap key content from her session and access further information on learning strategies, resources and tools in the ‘Michelle Works Out Loud’ page on her website. Everyone is welcome to follow these posts and join the conversation using #futurereadylearning on LinkedIn or Twitter.